Newcomer promises weird and delivers.
Let’s get the painful truth out of the way first. This may be the worst, most hideous, cover I’ve ever seen on a book. I refused to leave it face up on any surface. I show it here only so I can prove that I have it, and so that I can surreptitiously show my own book, which has a much better cover, in the same photo. I even googled “ugly book covers.” It’s not there yet. Wait a year.
Newcomer’s first two books, El Dorado Blue (classic and classy cover), and Diminishing Return (minimalist cover), were easy to look at. The Dead Star Press (Newcomer’s company) logo is pretty cool. I tried to buy a T-shirt, but they were out of the pink on black, so I passed. The point here is that Newcomer has a good eye. Is he deliberately poking us with this ugly cover? Probably.
Enough nattering about the cover. On to the book.
I liked it and am glad I read it. It’s not profound in the sense that Diminishing Return was, but it has at least three WTF twists in it that caught me by surprise. I love that. If I can see the end of the book coming by page 10, I’m disappointed. No disappointment here.
So as not to spoil any of those twists, I’ll crib here from the back cover:
“Chris, a beleaguered, ennui-plagued office worker, struggles with his inability to give his wife a child.”
In that one sentence, Newcomer hits two hobgoblins of modern male life: Work sucks, and, if you can’t impregnate your willing wife, you’re not really much of a man. There’s a lot more to talk about, but the twists are key in this book and I don’t want to spoil them for anyone.
Newcomer’s prose has evolved over his three books. The book flows nicely. On the Feral scale, it comes in at an 8 for the story and an IDK for the science. Maybe a five? Some is solid, other aspects, well, go with it.
Caution, here there be spoilers.
There’s really only one nit that I have to pick:
The event that triggers Darkest Day is a Coronal Mass Ejection of such proportions that 1/3 of the population is killed. The death of so many is mentioned on the back cover, so that’s not a huge spoiler. Some of the deaths come from the failure of electronics due to the accompanying electromagnetic pulse.
Newcomer is correct in saying that EMPs are transient events and I’m routinely triggered by movies where they kill every circuit for all eternity. On the other hand, if an EMP is big enough to result in the death of 2-3 billion humans, it’s going to permanently fry a lot of chips that aren’t radiation hardened. That’s at odds with the evolution of the story and one of the critical characters.
Treat it like a bullet that manages to spin without continuing to move forward. Suck it up and read on. It’s worth it. Based on Newcomer’s other work, I pre-ordered it from Dead Star. It’s on Amazon, but hard to find. Here’s a link: Darkest Day.
Thanks for another awesome review. I wanted the cover to be as weird and off-putting as the story. It looks as though I’ve succeeded. Much appreciated, truly! We should chat about the CME/EMP someday. I think you’d love my explanation, it might add a layer to the book for you. I couldn’t be more satisfied that you found the twists compelling. That was one of my biggest hopes for the work.